The country's disputed results come down to the so-called "single-mandate districts" that account for half of the legislature.

Gleb Garanich/Reuters

No one expected clarity in the immediate wake of Ukraine's October 28 parliamentary elections. And, although the vote-counting is still under way, it seems
evident that everyone was right.

Preliminary figures with just over one-third of the votes counted show the ruling Party of Regions with slightly more than 36 percent of the party-list
vote, followed by the United Opposition, which includes jailed former Prime Minister Yulia Tymoshenko's Batkivshchina (Fatherland) party, which took 21
percent. The Communist Party is running third with 15 percent, followed by boxing champion Vitali Kitschko's Udar (Punch) alliance with 13 percent, and the
Svoboda (Freedom) party with 8 percent.

Both the government and the opposition rushed to claim victory. The Party of Regions has said their win was "obvious," while former Foreign Minister
Arseniy Yatsenyuk, head of the United Opposition bloc, said on October 28 that "it is absolutely clear that the Ukrainian people support the opposition."

Who turns out to be correct will depend on what happens in the 225 single-mandate districts that make up half of the 450-seat parliament.

Kataryna Wolczuk, a senior lecturer at the University of Birmingham's Center for Russian and East European Studies, says that "half of the deputies will be
elected in the single-mandate districts and about half of them are independent."

"Some are representing political parties. However, exactly how those deputies elected in single-mandate districts are going to align themselves or position
themselves in the new parliament is yet to be seen," Wolczuk says.

Shifting Boundaries

Traditionally, many of those running nominally as independents in the single-mandate districts end up supporting the ruling party. Those districts were
abandoned after the 2004 Orange Revolution -- but reinstated with legislation initiated by the Party of Regions in 2011.

And as Elena Gnedina, an analyst with a London-based risk consultancy, explains, this gives the ruling party an advantage.

"There will be 225 deputies elected [in single-mandate districts, many of them] as independents, and many are afraid these people will join with the Party
of Regions and the Communist Party and build a strong faction in the parliament. This is quite possible and this has happened before in Ukraine. In the
1998 and 2002 elections that is what decidedly happened," Gnedina says.

Results from the single-mandate districts are expected later in the week.

Additionally, analysts expect the Party of Regions to attempt to relentlessly entice, persuade, and cajole lawmakers from other parties to switch to their
side.

This was one way the Party of Regions buttressed their faction after the 2007 parliamentary elections when they won 34.37 percent of the vote followed by
Tymoshenko's Batkivshchina, which took 30.71 percent, former President Viktor Yushchenko's Our Ukraine with 14.15 percent, and the Communist Party with
5.39 percent.

And analyst Wolczuk says the ruling party should again have ample opportunity to encourage defections.

"Batkivshchina (Fatherland), they are a bit more tried and tested, whereas we are not sure about Udar. It is known that there are several businesspeople on
their party list and businesspeople tend to be vulnerable once in parliament because their business may be used against them to persuade them to join the
ruling party's coalition," Wolczuk says.

How much the Party of Regions is able to augment its number is seats will be critical in determining whether -- together with support from the Communists
-- they will achieve the two-thirds working majority of 300 seats needed to amend the constitution.

Staying In Power

Achieving a working "constitutional majority," according to Olga Shumylo-Tapiola, a visiting scholar with the Carnegie Endowment-Europe in Brussels, is
"the aim of the Party of Regions." Such a majority, she says, would enable Yanukovych virtually to guarantee himself a second term and, very likely,
hand-pick a successor.

"The president has never hidden the fact he basically doesn't want to [leave power]. He wants to stay in power for as long as possible -- him or through
successors who are close to his Family -- but he is not sure he can be reelected in 2015. So moving the [presidential] election from the popular vote to
the parliament would be one of the ideas that a new constitutional majority led by the Party of Regions would work on," Shumylo-Tapiola said.

At the same time, the Ukrainian parliament remains an important platform from which the opposition can make its policies and personalities known. And this
is also crucial for the next presidential ballot. With the two major opposition parties -- Tymoshenko's Batkivshchina and Klitschko's Udar -- seemingly set
to enter the new parliament with significant factions, much depends on how much they will be able to pull together. Shumylo-Tapiola worries that the 2015
ambitions of the opposition leaders could produce gridlock or worse.

"So two opposition parties get into parliament in quite good numbers, but they don't manage to work together -- again, here we are speaking about the
presidential ambitions for 2015 and Klitschko and Yatsenyuk basically trying to not cooperate but to fight with each other in the parliament through their
parties to show who is better for the voter in 2015," Shumylo-Tapiola says.

About the Author

Most Popular

Five days after Hurricane Maria made landfall in Puerto Rico, its devastating impact is becoming clearer.

Five days after Hurricane Maria made landfall in Puerto Rico, its devastating impact is becoming clearer. Most of the U.S. territory currently has no electricity or running water, fewer than 250 of the island’s 1,600 cellphone towers are operational, and damaged ports, roads, and airports are slowing the arrival and transport of aid. Communication has been severely limited and some remote towns are only now being contacted. Jenniffer Gonzalez, the Resident Commissioner of Puerto Rico, told the Associated Press that Hurricane Maria has set the island back decades.

A small group of programmers wants to change how we code—before catastrophe strikes.

There were six hours during the night of April 10, 2014, when the entire population of Washington State had no 911 service. People who called for help got a busy signal. One Seattle woman dialed 911 at least 37 times while a stranger was trying to break into her house. When he finally crawled into her living room through a window, she picked up a kitchen knife. The man fled.

The 911 outage, at the time the largest ever reported, was traced to software running on a server in Englewood, Colorado. Operated by a systems provider named Intrado, the server kept a running counter of how many calls it had routed to 911 dispatchers around the country. Intrado programmers had set a threshold for how high the counter could go. They picked a number in the millions.

The greatest threats to free speech in America come from the state, not from activists on college campuses.

The American left is waging war on free speech. That’s the consensus from center-left to far right; even Nazis and white supremacists seek to wave the First Amendment like a bloody shirt. But the greatest contemporary threat to free speech comes not from antifa radicals or campus leftists, but from a president prepared to use the power and authority of government to chill or suppress controversial speech, and the political movement that put him in office, and now applauds and extends his efforts.

The most frequently cited examples of the left-wing war on free speech are the protests against right-wing speakers that occur on elite college campuses, some of which have turned violent.New York’s Jonathan Chait has described the protests as a “war on the liberal mind” and the “manifestation of a serious ideological challenge to liberalism—less serious than the threat from the right, but equally necessary to defeat.” Most right-wing critiques fail to make such ideological distinctions, and are far more apocalyptic—some have unironically proposed state laws that define how universities are and are not allowed to govern themselves in the name of defending free speech.

A growing body of research debunks the idea that school quality is the main determinant of economic mobility.

One of the most commonly taught stories American schoolchildren learn is that of Ragged Dick, Horatio Alger’s 19th-century tale of a poor, ambitious teenaged boy in New York City who works hard and eventually secures himself a respectable, middle-class life. This “rags to riches” tale embodies one of America’s most sacred narratives: that no matter who you are, what your parents do, or where you grow up, with enough education and hard work, you too can rise the economic ladder.

A body of research has since emerged to challenge this national story, casting the United States not as a meritocracy but as a country where castes are reinforced by factors like the race of one’s childhood neighbors and how unequally income is distributed throughout society. One such study was published in 2014, by a team of economists led by Stanford’s Raj Chetty. After analyzing federal income tax records for millions of Americans, and studying, for the first time, the direct relationship between a child’s earnings and that of their parents, they determined that the chances of a child growing up at the bottom of the national income distribution to ever one day reach the top actually varies greatly by geography. For example, they found that a poor child raised in San Jose, or Salt Lake City, has a much greater chance of reaching the top than a poor child raised in Baltimore, or Charlotte. They couldn’t say exactly why, but they concluded that five correlated factors—segregation, family structure, income inequality, local school quality, and social capital—were likely to make a difference. Their conclusion: America is land of opportunity for some. For others, much less so.

One hundred years ago, a retail giant that shipped millions of products by mail moved swiftly into the brick-and-mortar business, changing it forever. Is that happening again?

Amazon comes to conquer brick-and-mortar retail, not to bury it. In the last two years, the company has opened 11 physical bookstores. This summer, it bought Whole Foods and its 400 grocery locations. And last week, the company announced a partnership with Kohl’s to allow returns at the physical retailer’s stores.

Why is Amazon looking more and more like an old-fashioned retailer? The company’s do-it-all corporate strategy adheres to a familiar playbook—that of Sears, Roebuck & Company. Sears might seem like a zombie today, but it’s easy to forget how transformative the company was exactly 100 years ago, when it, too, was capitalizing on a mail-to-consumer business to establish a physical retail presence.

The foundation of Donald Trump’s presidency is the negation of Barack Obama’s legacy.

It is insufficient to statethe obvious of Donald Trump: that he is a white man who would not be president were it not for this fact. With one immediate exception, Trump’s predecessors made their way to high office through the passive power of whiteness—that bloody heirloom which cannot ensure mastery of all events but can conjure a tailwind for most of them. Land theft and human plunder cleared the grounds for Trump’s forefathers and barred others from it. Once upon the field, these men became soldiers, statesmen, and scholars; held court in Paris; presided at Princeton; advanced into the Wilderness and then into the White House. Their individual triumphs made this exclusive party seem above America’s founding sins, and it was forgotten that the former was in fact bound to the latter, that all their victories had transpired on cleared grounds. No such elegant detachment can be attributed to Donald Trump—a president who, more than any other, has made the awful inheritance explicit.

National Geographic Magazine has opened its annual photo contest, with the deadline for submissions coming up on November 17.

National Geographic Magazine has opened its annual photo contest for 2017, with the deadline for submissions coming up on November 17. The Grand Prize Winner will receive $10,000 (USD), publication in National Geographic Magazine and a feature on National Geographic’s Instagram account. The folks at National Geographic were, once more, kind enough to let me choose among the contest entries so far for display here. The captions below were written by the individual photographers, and lightly edited for style.

What the Trump administration has been threatening is not a “preemptive strike.”

Donald Trump lies so frequently and so brazenly that it’s easy to forget that there are political untruths he did not invent. Sometimes, he builds on falsehoods that predated his election, and that enjoy currency among the very institutions that generally restrain his power.

That’s the case in the debate over North Korea. On Monday, The New York Timesdeclared that “the United States has repeatedly suggested in recent months” that it “could threaten pre-emptive military action” against North Korea. On Sunday, The Washington Post—after asking Americans whether they would “support or oppose the U.S. bombing North Korean military targets” in order “to get North Korea to give up its nuclear weapons”—announced that “Two-thirds of Americans oppose launching a preemptive military strike.” Citing the Post’s findings, The New York Times the same day reported that Americans are “deeply opposed to the kind of pre-emptive military strike” that Trump “has seemed eager to threaten.”

More comfortable online than out partying, post-Millennials are safer, physically, than adolescents have ever been. But they’re on the brink of a mental-health crisis.

One day last summer, around noon, I called Athena, a 13-year-old who lives in Houston, Texas. She answered her phone—she’s had an iPhone since she was 11—sounding as if she’d just woken up. We chatted about her favorite songs and TV shows, and I asked her what she likes to do with her friends. “We go to the mall,” she said. “Do your parents drop you off?,” I asked, recalling my own middle-school days, in the 1980s, when I’d enjoy a few parent-free hours shopping with my friends. “No—I go with my family,” she replied. “We’ll go with my mom and brothers and walk a little behind them. I just have to tell my mom where we’re going. I have to check in every hour or every 30 minutes.”

Those mall trips are infrequent—about once a month. More often, Athena and her friends spend time together on their phones, unchaperoned. Unlike the teens of my generation, who might have spent an evening tying up the family landline with gossip, they talk on Snapchat, the smartphone app that allows users to send pictures and videos that quickly disappear. They make sure to keep up their Snapstreaks, which show how many days in a row they have Snapchatted with each other. Sometimes they save screenshots of particularly ridiculous pictures of friends. “It’s good blackmail,” Athena said. (Because she’s a minor, I’m not using her real name.) She told me she’d spent most of the summer hanging out alone in her room with her phone. That’s just the way her generation is, she said. “We didn’t have a choice to know any life without iPads or iPhones. I think we like our phones more than we like actual people.”

The president has sided with Luther Strange in the primary matchup, a candidate who has lagged behind his challenger Roy Moore in polling.

Alabama Republicans head to the polls on Tuesday in a special election primary. The race pits former state attorney general Luther Strange against former judge Roy Moore in a fight for the Republican nomination in the race for the Senate seat vacated by Attorney General Jeff Sessions. Polls close at 8 p.m. EST.

Strange has President Trump’s endorsement and has benefited from millions of dollars in spending from political groups aligned with Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell. Even so, Strange, who was temporarily appointed to the Senate seat in February by then-Alabama Governor Robert Bentley, has trailed in the polls, lagging behind his challenger. Moore is a conservative firebrand who was removed from the Alabama Supreme Court in 2003 after refusing to move a monument to the Ten Commandments from the state judicial building.